SP3 for Exchange Server
2010, was released in February 2013. This is a
long awaited service pack. Back in October 2012,
Microsoft announced that they had reached RTM for
Exchange 2013 . However, Exchange 2010 wasn’t yet
compatible with 2013. In order to install and
co-exist Exchange 2013 with Exchange 2010 you had to
have SP3 installed for 2010. Also with this service
pack, you will be able to install Exchange 2010 with
SP3 on Windows Server 2012.

Coexistence
with Exchange 2013:Customers
who want to introduce Exchange Server
2013 into their existing Exchange 2010
infrastructure will need the coexistence
changes shipping in SP3. NOTE: Exchange 2010 SP3
allows Exchange 2010 servers to coexist
with Exchange 2013 CU1, which is also
scheduled to be released in Q1 2013.
Customers can test and validate this
update in a representative lab
environment prior to rolling out in
their production environments as an
important coexistence preparatory step
before introducing Exchange Server 2013
CU1.

Support for
Windows Server 2012: With SP3,
you can install and deploy Exchange
Server 2010 on computers that are
running Windows Server 2012.

Support for
Internet Explorer 10: With SP3,
you can use IE10 to connect to Exchange
2010.

What you need to know before
installing Service Pack 3 for Microsoft Exchange
2010:

SP3 require Active
Directory schema update

Exchange 2010 SP3 is
listed as including all security bug
fixes up to SP2 UR5-v2. It actually
includes all security and bug fixes up
to SP2 UR6

Installation of
Service Pack 3 for Exchange Server 2010
can take a while (about 30 minutes),
depends on Exchange environment.

In my lab, I have a typical Exchange
Server installation. A Typical installation consist of
the Client Access , Hub Transport and Mailbox Server roles,
along with the Exchange Management Console. My Exchange
Server has SP2 applied on it and fully updated.

Note: Make sure the user you are
going to login with to install SP3 has the appropriate
privileges , as SP3 will update your Active Directory
Schema. I will be using an account which has the
following privileges : Domain Admin, Enterprise Admin
and Schema Admin.

Once the download is completed,
double click on Exchange2010-SP3-x64.exe
to extract its content.
Create a Folder on your Desktop it, lets call it
Exchange 2010 SP3 , and then browse to this
folder and extract the content of Exchange2010-SP3-x64.exe
into it.

Once the Extraction process is
completed, open the folder where SP3
setup files were extracted into it, and
the double click on Setup.exe

Click on Install Microsoft
Exchange Server upgrade

On the Introduction page, Click
Next

On the License Agreement
page, select I
accept the terms in the license
agreement and then click
Next

On the Readiness Checks
page, multiple checks will be done to
verify the system and server are ready
for the upgrade.

A warning that you will encounter is to
install KB2550886 which fixes an issue
with Windows clustering. If you don’t
run any DAG’s (which use clustering) ,
you can safely move past the warning.

If no other errors were displayed, then click
Upgrade

After the installation of SP3, although
the setup does not ask for any reboot, I
always prefer to reboot the server after
a major service pack upgrades. So take a
moment and restart your server. As you
can see, installation took approximately
24 minutes. Click Finish.

To check Exchange Server version
number after installing SP3, open Exchange Management
Console, then from the Menu bar, click on Help
> About Exchange Server 2010...

Exchange Server 2010 with SP3 version number is :
14.03.0123.003

Also from the Server Configuration
node, you can see the Exchange Server version
14.3 build 123.4